The advent of the personal computer has revolutionized the working environment in the last ten years by giving individuals unprecedented ability to process data and perform sophisticated analysis. In recent years, the capabilities and power of the PC on the desktop has been amplified several orders of magnitude by the development of advanced networking techniques that link together computers into rings of shared information and communication. Together, these developments have changed the way business is done.
To take advantage of these new capabilities, companies have hired large staffs of computer experts to implement and maintain the new systems that are sprouting up in headquarters, regional offices, and home offices. Desktop computers are complicated devices with a wide range of device requirements, operating system attributes, and application settings that must be configured to insure proper performance. Indeed, most computers today are linked together into a network that demands select communication protocols, organizational structures, passwords, and the like for successful operation. In addition, desktop computers include connections to printers, scanners, modems, data cards, etc. each of which implicates a range of specialized system settings to allow operation. Added to this is the collection of individual software applications that typically populate most workstations--such as word processors, spreadsheets, and database tools. And, of course, some companies rely on select proprietary software installed on each machine. See, specifically, U.S. Pat. No. 5,878,258, incorporated herein by reference.
The foregoing discussion delineates multiple computers at a site, each of which represents a complex mix of software and hardware from a variety of vendors. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising to find that most computers take significant time to set up in the first place--often requiring the services of a highly skilled PC expert. For example, it is difficult to install a new application onto a PC workstation in under 20 minutes. Assuming twenty separate applications, install time will often extend beyond six hours. Thereafter, as the system is upgraded to include new software or hardware, the delicate balance in the initial setup is at some risk.
The above efforts of system setup and upgrade are magnified for offices with multiple workstations. Indeed, by the time the PC expert finishes configuring all the workstations in a typical office, the original PC is likely obsolete and the applications initially installed all need upgrading. This would be an enormous chore.
Recognizing these issues, there have been several efforts to automate the install process and to provide homogenous creation of workstation platforms in an automated fashion. Some of these are commercially available, such as the WinStall product distributed by Seagate. Others reflect proprietary efforts that have not been disclosed to the public or commercially distributed. This includes the prior PRISM system used by Merrill Lynch for its DOS based workstations during the past decade. In general, these systems provided an enhanced capability to create the requisite workstation platform with minimal customized support for each installation. This, of course, translated to substantial savings when multiplied by the number of new systems that must be brought to operating status in a given year.
Recent operating system advances and increases in network communication capabilities has established a pressing need for greater automated configuration and installation facilities. This is particularly true in the Windows NT environment which is now growing in importance. Its now becoming particularly common to have branch offices utilizing a local area network--LAN--to support data distribution amongst the various employees and activities undertaken at the local office. In this arrangement, depicted graphically in FIG. 1, the branch office LAN includes at least two servers and a plurality of separate but interconnected workstations. In addition, this arrangement is linked via per se well-known communications bridge to a separate wide area network--WAN--either privately supported ("intranet") or part of a public access network, such as the Internet. As depicted in FIG. 1, a number of separate LANs, for each branch office, are placed in the WAN and configured to be in communication with other members of their network.
These networks are supported by separate network operating system--NOS-- and support services. To insure proper configuration and enhanced maintenance, it is important to have each of the nodes (workstations) on the network conform to one of a small set of hardware specifications, and configure each in a uniform manner. Using the same hardware components for each workstation insures that once it is debugged, the workstation configuration will be repeated without problems to identical hardware.
The foregoing system demands have created a difficult situation where expansions and upgrades to computer systems require enormous commitment of time and effort of skilled PC experts, simply to configure the new arrangements to insure proper operation. It was with this understanding of the problems of the prior art that formed the impetus to create the present invention.